COVID-19 in perspective

As I sip my wine and listen to the plaintiff violin concertos of Vivaldi I can’t help but think about the worst pandemics in history.

Fascination with tragedies of historic proportions is human nature. From the fall of the Greeks through world wars and more, people continue to be fascinated with how quickly and without warning, mass tragedy can happen and how it can literally change the world.

And there is comfort, if that is what it can be called, to know that through the generations, disease has killed millions but that the world somehow prevailed, each time.

Today’s COVID-19 is only the latest and one of the lesser deadly ones in a series of outbreaks that go back at least to the time of the Romans.

The Spaniards who colonized the Caribbean led the worst outbreak when they brought the gift of smallpox, measles and the bubonic plague to the indigenous people. The natives had no prior exposure and no natural immunities and as many as 90 percent of them were wiped out in north and south America.

It was of no good for the indigenous people who died, but by the late 18th century, smallpox was the first virus epidemic to be ended by a vaccine. A British doctor, Edward Jenner, discovered that a milder virus known as cowpox made people immune to smallpox.

The poster child for pandemics through the years has to be the Black Death, also known as Bubonic Plague. Compared with the Black Death, COVID-19 is a relative light weight. The Black Death killed as many as 200 million people from 1346–1353, as it spread its deadly cloud through Europe, Africa and Asia.

COVID-19 was first spread by bats in China. The Black Death was spread by infected rats and fleas that had stowed away on merchant ships that unknowingly brought the scourge to three continents. Victims died of massive blisters that often covered their entire bodies.

As with most pandemics through history, there was no treatment for bubonic plague. Instead the sick were isolated and the healthy were told to keep their distance. Can you say quarantine and safe distance? Until the advent of vaccines, the plagues of yesteryear essentially ended after there were no people left to infect.

The Black Plague was just the latest pandemic of Bubonic plague. The Plague of Justinian ravaged the Byzantine empire from 541–542, killing 25 million. The Antonine Plague of 165 AD, believed to have been smallpox or measles, took the lives of 5 million in Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, including much of the Roman army.

No plague is nice but there have been some that were more vile than others. Victims of the Cyprian plague in 250 A.D. got diarrhea, vomiting, throat ulcers, fever and gangrenous hands and feet.

Leprosy, another particularly nasty disease, grew to pandemic dimensions in the 11th Century. It caused sores and deformities, and ostracism as it was believed to be a punishment from God.

In modern times, the most deadly pandemic was the so-called “Spanish flu” of 1918 that claimed 20 million to 50 million lives while infecting 500 million people. The Spanish influenza killed healthy, young adults, different than other influenza outbreaks through history that typically struck the elderly or people with underlying conditions.

Not far behind in its deadly toll was the HIV/AIDS pandemic which claimed 36 million lives since 1981 and peaked from 2005–2012. Treatments have allowed many infected people to live longer lives but 5 percent of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa are still infected.

Then there was the Hong Kong Flu of 1968, which killed 1 million, and the Asian Flu that lasted from 1956–58 and killed an estimated 2 million, including 69,800 in the U.S. The “Asiatic Flu” or “Russian Flu” of 1889–1890 killed one million people in central Asia, northwestern Canada and Greenland.

A bit less deadly was the sixth cholera pandemic of 1910–11. It started in India before spreading and killing more than 800,000 people in the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Russia. It spread to the U.S. but American authorities were able to isolate the infected and only a handful died.

The third cholera epidemic killed 1 million from 1852–1860. It originated in India and spread rampaged through Asia, Europe, North America and Africa. The cause eventually was tracked to contaminated water, but not before 23,000 people died in Great Britain.

Now that you have some understanding of the pandemics through the years you should feel a bit more comforted that COVID-19 will eventually pass.

Bruised, battered and bloodied but never broken.